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feedmyleg posted:Huh. So you can use capital letters and full-length words, you just choose not to when asking for writing advice. 
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May 31, 2019 15:20
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omg It was hard for me to accept your free advice that I asked for because some of your letters were too small. Feel free to ignore this sarcastic reply; I haven't published any fiction.
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May 31, 2019 16:15
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crabrock posted:omg Size matters, bro
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May 31, 2019 16:36
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Pratchett was the best because he had a giant full-page YES in one of his books.
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May 31, 2019 16:43
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flerp has given crits that have singed my eyebrows and blistered my rear end, doesn't matter if he's saying "ur story is garbage" or "your story is garbage," he's right
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May 31, 2019 16:59
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what size of apostrophe are you packin’? *wink*
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May 31, 2019 16:59
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feedmyleg posted:Huh. So you can use capital letters and full-length words, you just choose not to when asking for writing advice. I think I even saw a period in there somewhere. Holy poo poo.
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May 31, 2019 17:56
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I use full capitalization and proper grammar in all of my posts, yet all my published tomes are capless and punctuationless collections of verbal farts.
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May 31, 2019 19:42
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Nae! posted:I use full capitalization and proper grammar in all of my posts, yet all my published tomes are capless and punctuationless collections of verbal farts. 
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May 31, 2019 23:57
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i, only use commas as, punctuation, because they,re the most sophisticated,,,
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Jun 1, 2019 01:42
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Djeser posted:i, only use commas as, punctuation, because they,re the most sophisticated,,, I double all my spaces because my MacBooks powerful butterfly technology broke my spacebar after six months
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Jun 1, 2019 02:43
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Nae! posted:I use full capitalization and proper grammar in all of my posts, yet all my published tomes are capless and punctuationless collections of verbal farts. Release new editions with a few pages of punctuation in the back for the readers to use as they see fit, ala A Pickle for the Knowing Ones.
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Jun 1, 2019 03:03
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The first time I blurted out the phrase "punctuation masculinity," everyone who got it also instantly hated that they knew exactly what I was talking about.
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Jun 1, 2019 05:24
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semicolons; or gtfo
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Jun 1, 2019 11:29
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Djeser posted:i, only use commas as, punctuation, because they,re the most sophisticated,,, Holy poo poo, William Shattner posts here??
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Jun 1, 2019 14:11
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So like many people here, I've always wanted to write a novel. I've tried and failed a few times, trying to write things that I thought people wanted to read, or things that I thought it would be 'good' to write, as opposed to something I actually wanted. I've been thinking about a writing a fantasy story, and I think I've got a fairly unique setting, and a few meta 'meta plot' events and themes. I've made a little mind map of these things and the world, era, and trends-and-forces type threads are in place. The problem is, that I don't actually have any characters yet, or any character-driven plots. I know I have alot of work to do myself to figure the actual characters and plots out, and I'm not really asking for help on that - but I'm just not sure of the process on how to ensure whoever I come up with ends up driving the story, rather than putting the cart before the literary horse. My current plan is to think of a couple of characters which have their own needs and desires which are largely independent of the macro-level themes, and then see where they fit into the various factions and power dynamics afterward? Any guidance would be really gratefully appreciated. Southern Heel fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jun 8, 2019 |
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Jun 8, 2019 18:05
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So basically you've got a world, but you're not sure what story to tell in that world. That's a pretty common problem. It's fun to invent ideas, but harder to figure out how to make them matter to people. My advice depends a bit on what kind of story you're interested in telling, whether you want a big ensemble cast thing, or something that focuses on a few characters, or just one. But one option is to start poking at the basic premises of this world. Take the underlying assumptions and start asking "what if?" What if an immortal god turns out to be mortal? What if a king tries to enact religious reforms against the will of the priests? What if mages are kept under close scrutiny, but then there's a murder in the palace and only a mage could have done it? What if a woman becomes ruler in a patriarchal society? What if a client state of an empire suddenly rebels? This is a good way to figure out a large-scale drama, because by nature, it's going to involve a lot of people and you can draw your characters from those affected by it. What you choose to poke at can also depend on whether you want a military story or court intrigue or mystery or wizard duels or whatever. If you're thinking of a story on a smaller scale, or you're just trying to focus on finding the characters, what you can start thinking about instead is what personal conflicts might emerge in this world. If it's a world where the afterlife is real, what happens if someone doesn't want to go there? What kind of person would that be? What would they want to do instead? If it's a world where a mage's office is hereditary, what happens when they die too soon and now their untrained daughter has to take over? This isn't too different from the first bit of advice, it's just considering your world on a personal scale instead of on a larger scale. What conflicts are people going to have to deal with? Are there people stuck between two cultures, two social classes, two different sets of obligations? (Even if it's just their job and their personal life, or their place in society and their dreams of something bigger.) Not every character has to be that interesting, but the main characters of a book are generally going to be interesting people. Also, notice that I talked about being interesting in terms of conflict. There may very well be people in your story who are interesting from a worldbuilding perspective, but who don't really experience much in the way of conflict. It doesn't matter if my immortal god-king drives the engine of creation that maintains the mortal world if all he does is be divine and eminent or whatever all day. (It doesn't mean I can't use him as a character, but I might be better served in writing a story about his jealous personal servant, because there's a lot more inherent drama there.)
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Jun 8, 2019 19:07
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Southern Heel posted:So like many people here, I've always wanted to write a novel. I've tried and failed a few times, trying to write things that I thought people wanted to read, or things that I thought it would be 'good' to write, as opposed to something I actually wanted. I've been thinking about a writing a fantasy story, and I think I've got a fairly unique setting, and a few meta 'meta plot' events and themes. I've made a little mind map of these things and the world, era, and trends-and-forces type threads are in place. The problem is, that I don't actually have any characters yet, or any character-driven plots. I know I have alot of work to do myself to figure the actual characters and plots out, and I'm not really asking for help on that - but I'm just not sure of the process on how to ensure whoever I come up with ends up driving the story, rather than putting the cart before the literary horse. I'm juts an amateur dummy, but I think you've got that entirely backwards. A story is built primarily around characters you care about and whose problems you emphasize with and want to see resolved (there are also unlikable protagonists you want to see fail, but I'm leaving those out). If you have major themes in mind for your story, that should be tied closely to the characters, not disconnected from them. If you've built a world around a theme or idea, your main character should have a strong relationship with that idea. Generally that means your main character is opposed to the idea and wants to fight against or change the idea. Maybe they succeed, maybe the idea is too strong and they fail.
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Jun 9, 2019 17:22
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Actually with a set up like that you could do something like Game of Thrones where the political factions are practically characters in their own right and characters can get killed, but the overall social structures live on. Not that you don’t need strong characters, maybe even more so, but it wouldn’t be individual based storytelling, it would be more epic. (In the grand sense, not the colloquial sense.)
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Jun 9, 2019 19:11
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Djeser posted:So basically you've got a world, but you're not sure what story to tell in that world. That's a pretty common problem. It's fun to invent ideas, but harder to figure out how to make them matter to people. This is all really good advice, nice post OP
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Jun 9, 2019 19:26
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Wow that's some pretty great advice. I'm going to mull it over some more before I ask again. I think I want to tend towards the trends and forces style - a story with a relatively wide scope. I don't know if I've got the skill (yet?) to write a really good character drama, so I feel like this is a way to get my metaphorical foot in the door with writing in general. I've re-written the meta-plot points as 'what ifs', now I think I need to spend some time exploring characters and seeing how their 'what ifs' fit (or not)! I do get the point that characters should 'come first', but I've just finished up Expeditionary Force and it's a silly space opera pulp sci-fi novel, the entertainment factor does not come from the great depth and conflict of the characters.
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Jun 9, 2019 20:35
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Southern Heel posted:Wow that's some pretty great advice. I'm going to mull it over some more before I ask again. I think I want to tend towards the trends and forces style - a story with a relatively wide scope. I don't know if I've got the skill (yet?) to write a really good character drama, so I feel like this is a way to get my metaphorical foot in the door with writing in general. I'm working on a sci-fi adventure novel which is more than a little pulpy, but you can still have interesting characters tied to a theme. Having a theme doesn't necessarily mean reaching into the Big Ol' Bucket of Literary Symbols and dripping them across every page. Theme can also work in comedies, and other light works, it's not exclusive to books full of navel-gazing melodrama.
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Jun 9, 2019 22:10
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I thought I’d add to the “what-it” stuff by saying that I’ve had some success applying it to plot and characters well after I thought everything in the story was established. I had a main character who I was really excited about because he was gonna be so cool and so mysterious and have this compelling backstory that would reveal itself over the story. The problem was that it always felt forced and without drama, like the character was just sitting there waiting to dispense his story when prompted. I got a little distance from that story and worked on something else, and a little thought hit me one night where I asked, “What if he’s full of poo poo?” It started this big cascade of follow-up questions and he became a much more sympathetic character with agency and insecurity and all the stuff that makes a character more “real.” I’m not a successful writer but that felt like a pretty important lesson to me at the time, so take what you want away from that.
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Jun 16, 2019 22:54
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is a wiki a book posted:I got a little distance from that This in itself is good advice; much like a painter does, take a step back every now and then and let your work rest for a while. A more global and/or detached look often does wonders when it comes to being able to see where it's lacking. Do it before you get stuck as well. Also, in addition to the OP saying that you should read your work out loud: reading your work in print somehow always proves to be worthwhile. It gets expensive (and is pretty bad for the environment) when you print out entire novels, but it's a classic exercise for literary professionals and one I would heartily recommend.
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Jun 16, 2019 23:46
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Plus it's nearly always better to get story elements out fast where it can live and breathe in the game rather than holding on to them for a reveal that might fall flat.
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Jun 17, 2019 01:25
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sebmojo posted:Plus it's nearly always better to get story elements out fast where it can live and breathe in the game rather than holding on to them for a reveal that might fall flat. Like, look at Sixth Sense vs The Village. In The Sixth Sense, the story's already good, but the reveal that Willis was enghostened the whole time makes the story more powerful. In The Village, the reveal that the village is a hippie enclave doesn't do poo poo to the story outside of yell "whoaoaoaooa how DIFFERENT" and it retroactively makes the world of the story feel worse, and cheap, and bullshit, because the few moments the reveal could have been powerful are forgotten. Nobody's gunna be upset if you don't have a twist, but people are gunna be real mad if you throw one in and it sucks rear end.
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Jun 18, 2019 12:28
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What do you call the feeling when you write the characters into a tight corner, and then, after a few hours of thinking how to cheat them out of this, realize that the means to solve the problem are already there in the characters and the setting? It's awesome.
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Jun 20, 2019 16:33
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SelenicMartian posted:What do you call the feeling when you write the characters into a tight corner, and then, after a few hours of thinking how to cheat them out of this, realize that the means to solve the problem are already there in the characters and the setting? It's awesome. It really is. You can only hope readers get the same kind of feeling.
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Jun 20, 2019 16:40
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Phil Moscowitz posted:It really is. You can only hope readers get the same kind of feeling. Readers at the beginning of the sequence: Psssh, they're gonna use that one thing to get out of this scrape, does the writer really think we don't remember they have it?
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Jun 20, 2019 19:59
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I've got a problem with the story I'm writing. It involves a character who just got through a harrowing conflict that took up years of his life, and everything was resolved in a satisfactory way. He thinks he should be happy but he finds himself feeling like he's missing something, like the excitement the life or death situations gave him. Then of course t he events of the story get into motion and he finds himself in that kind of circumstance again. The problem is that I don't know how I can make this into a character arc. Having this conflict in him resolved by an external circumstance doesn't really do anything, just leaves him back where he started after everything settles down again. But I also do want to start the story that way because it works so perfectly with the tone and atmosphere and where the story before this left him. Any ideas?
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Jun 28, 2019 04:44
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Character feels unfulfilled by quiet life because it lacks the excitement of conflict. Now he winds up back in conflict again. You want your character to learn something about themselves over the course of this arc. He could learn that he thrives in conflict, and at the end of the arc leaves his quiet life behind to seek out more excitement. Or, he could learn that excitement isn't worth it, and come to appreciate his quiet life in a way he hadn't before.
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Jun 28, 2019 05:21
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I've kept a dream log for the past 3 months. It's up to 12,000 words. I take melatonin before I sleep and my dreams feel like another universe. Essentially, the recorded dreams are (fiction) that is source material for all my creative projects: Song lyrics, screenplays, animation, everything. I can't take psychedelic drugs so my dreamstate is the next best thing.
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Jun 28, 2019 11:10
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das crikstar posted:I've kept a dream log for the past 3 months. It's up to 12,000 words. I take melatonin before I sleep and my dreams feel like another universe. Essentially, the recorded dreams are (fiction) that is source material for all my creative projects: Song lyrics, screenplays, animation, everything. I can't take psychedelic drugs so my dreamstate is the next best thing. cool
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Jun 28, 2019 12:38
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People are gonna love my short story plucked from last night's stress dream of letting my aunt's dogs out of her backyard accidentally 
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Jun 28, 2019 12:59
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oot posted:I've got a problem with the story I'm writing. It involves a character who just got through a harrowing conflict that took up years of his life, and everything was resolved in a satisfactory way. He thinks he should be happy but he finds himself feeling like he's missing something, like the excitement the life or death situations gave him. Then of course t he events of the story get into motion and he finds himself in that kind of circumstance again.
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Jun 28, 2019 16:00
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Djeser posted:Character feels unfulfilled by quiet life because it lacks the excitement of conflict. Now he winds up back in conflict again. You want your character to learn something about themselves over the course of this arc. He could learn that he thrives in conflict, and at the end of the arc leaves his quiet life behind to seek out more excitement. Or, he could learn that excitement isn't worth it, and come to appreciate his quiet life in a way he hadn't before. Well when you write it out like that it seems obvious. das crikstar posted:I've kept a dream log for the past 3 months. It's up to 12,000 words. I take melatonin before I sleep and my dreams feel like another universe. Essentially, the recorded dreams are (fiction) that is source material for all my creative projects: Song lyrics, screenplays, animation, everything. I can't take psychedelic drugs so my dreamstate is the next best thing. That's a classic thing to do. Dreams have been thought of as a source of creativity since forever. I can't imagine making that much detailed material and drawing from it months later though. It seems like I'd forget what made the individual dreams interesting or impactful to me. That's the thing about dreams: their meaning is incredibly specific, not only to one person but usually to one moment in that person's life. Whalley posted:Have the character reflect semiregularly how they just Don't Want To Do This Again, only to slowly realize how comfortable they are, and by the end, have them actively make the choice to not return to their quiet life, because at its heart that was just a vacation away from the person they feel more comfortable being. That wouldn't really make sense for this particular character. I'm probably gonna go with having the second calamity provide a chance for him to think about it more self-awarely and conclude at the end that it's not worth it, that his attachments to his friends and family are too strong important, and there are other ways to get excitement. But the crisis wasn't valueless and he takes something from it that helps him in civilian life too.
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Jun 28, 2019 17:02
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feedmyleg posted:People are gonna love my short story plucked from last night's stress dream of letting my aunt's dogs out of her backyard accidentally Sorry, Baja Men already wrote a song based off this dream.
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Jun 28, 2019 18:12
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If dreams are so influential why aren’t there more short stories about people’s teeth falling out? Huh?
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Jun 28, 2019 18:23
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A lot of great stories nothing really happens, characters just go through a string of incidents while having thoughts and feelings about something important which happened before the story. You gotta be really good to pull it off, though. Recovery narratives are like that, often. Post-loss, post-trauma, post-addiction. The jeopardy is, will the character go back to the bad place? And just living an ordinary life is the triumph.
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Jun 28, 2019 18:28
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Doctor Zero posted:If dreams are so influential why aren’t there more short stories about people’s teeth falling out? Huh? 
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Jun 28, 2019 18:41
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